David Colburn: Local efforts in civil rights movement too often overlooked

By David ColburnSpecial to the Star-Banner

Sunday

Feb 4, 2018 at 2:01 AM

In their initial years, Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday celebration and Black History Month broadened our understanding of the nation’s racial heritage and paved the way for a major, much-needed revision of American history textbooks. “Remembering King,” however, overshadowed many aspects of the civil rights movement and its multifaceted history, especially after his assassination. As a result, too many Americans learned only part of the story — a history told from the top down.

Nowhere was this more evident than in St. Augustine, where Dr. King and his non-violent army launched their civil rights campaign in the spring of 1964. St. Augustine was one of the four major campaigns of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The first was in Albany, Georgia, in 1961 and 1962, followed by Birmingham in 1963, St. Augustine in 1964, and Selma, Alabama, in 1965. While all these campaigns were local in nature, they were intended to mobilize nationwide support for desegregation and voting rights.

At the outset of the campaign, King and his aides branded St. Augustine as “the oldest segregated city in America,” to highlight how deeply embedded segregation was in this historic city, a symbol of the nation itself. King’s depiction of St. Augustine reflected his media savvy and brilliant grasp of public relations.

Nevertheless, the SCLC’s successes in these communities owed much to the work of local civil rights activists who campaigned for years to bring about racial change and mobilized a substantial network of supporters. This history often got overlooked in most early studies of the civil rights movement, which focused principally on King and the SCLC. St. Augustine, for example, had an active chapter of the NAACP well before SCLC arrived, which was led by two women who lobbied white city leaders to provide equal access and equal facilities for black citizens and their children. They also championed efforts to register black citizens to vote.

Over time these two women recruited local black teachers, black professionals, city workers, and students at Florida Memorial College to the movement. Dr. Robert Hayling, a local dentist, became the most prominent of the new members. He became frustrated with the pace of racial change and pursued a progressively more activist approach in response to the stonewalling by city leaders and the violence of local white militants. It was Hayling who led the efforts to recruit King and the SCLC to St. Augustine.

Despite the critical role played by the local NAACP and Hayling and his supporters, white leaders at the state and local levels contended that civil rights demonstrations did not begin until King and the SCLC entered the city on Easter week 1964. This twist on history dominated the St. Augustine civil rights story for many years.

That changed permanently, however, when Ms. Gwendolyn Duncan, a drug-prevention specialist and substitute schoolteacher, decided enough was enough. She wanted young people to know the real story and to be aware that the movement owed a great deal to local leaders who came from families like their own.

Together with local historian David Nolan, Duncan organized two conferences in 2007 and 2009 for teachers, counselors, activists, and historians to illuminate the full story of civil rights in St. Augustine. Duncan also formed an organization called Anniversary to Commemorate the Civil Rights Demonstrations (ACCORD), and with Nolan established a civil rights museum that featured the local movement, developed a city Freedom Trail, and brought former civil rights leaders like Dr. Hayling back to the community to be celebrated and interact with residents, teachers and students.

Hayling died in 2015 at the age of 86. But by keeping his and other local civil rights stories alive, Duncan, Nolan and others in communities throughout the South have enabled that history of local leadership to be told, from textbooks to tram tours, in all its complexity for the benefit of future generations.

This February, as we remember King and our nation’s racial heritage, let us also celebrate the work of local volunteers who helped guide us on the tortuous path to racial justice.

— David Colburn is a professor emeritus in history at the University of Florida. He has written extensively on civil rights and race relations.

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